TUNDE DADA

TUNDE DADA Poems

TUNDE DADA Biography

DADA DARE BABATUNDE(pen name, Tunde Dada) is a Nigerian writer, literary critic and an educationist with obsessive knack for creative writing, most especially poetry and prose. He teaches English language, literature-in- English and creative writing.)

The Best Poem Of TUNDE DADA

Africa Of Ages Past

Oh, Africa of ages past
The queen motherland of the ebony caste
Who all alone crusaded for moral values
And made her monument a colossal statue

The richest in the royal glamour
That was my Africa of unparalleled valour
That housed the peaceful peasants
And the kindred of the noblest pedants

Oh Africa, the ebony skin of beauty
The fairest queen on royal duty
Your breath was the sweetest fragrance
And your shiny skin like an ebony radiance


The sweetest home of the wildest fauna
The richest land of the greenest flora
Endowed with the most alluring savannas The plantation of the green and yellow bananas

The cattle longed to graze but your pasture
That was you, Africa of magnanimous stature
Who drank alone from the purest fountain
On the peak of kilimanjaro, her tallest mountain

Alas, their boats sailed down to your coast
Those men in their hats and their coats
They came, bearing a long chain of slavery
And with it broke your wings of bravery

There fell your arrows, bows, swords and shields
And your feet trembled upon your own fields
Slowly and slowly, you fell at the middle of the battle
Watched the aliens beat your sons like the cattle

Burnt were your gods, they call them dead
The little lamb, we follow in their stead
Deep, deep, deep, we have gone deep in alien rites
Our skin is black but our names turn white

Buuba had long gone but shirts have come
Iroo had lost but skimpy skirts have won
No longer do your sons eat from your pans
They consume the alien dishes from their cans

Your own goods, your sons neglect
But their goods, your sons respect
changing and changing, your colours fade
And silence kills those songs you played

No more echoes of virtues but the noise of vices
Long have gone your antiques from their eyes
Gone are those days That is what every mouth sayrs

Do wake up thiss day, you have slumbered
Your old treasures have been plundered
Do rise, oh Africa, strive now for your glory
And my mouth shall tell another story.

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